Creating a Roguelike in Python

I have decided to produce a Roguelike game to further my programming skills, and document the experience here.

Roguelikes appeal to me for their emphasis on gameplay over flashy graphics (to the point where many have no graphics at all) and for the extensive community of Roguelike developers and enthusiasts to draw upon. Also a Roguelike should make an ideal programming project, as it can be broken up in to several sub-projects such as:

• Random dungeon generation
• 'Line of sight' calculations
• Artificial Intelligence for monsters
• User Interface design
• Sound and Graphics
• A million things I haven't thought of yet!
  

Due to the nature of Roguelikes, the dungeon generation and gameplay aspects can be worked on before any consideration of adding graphics and sound effects.

This is by no means the first or only development blog for a Roguelike game. Dirk Kok's blog 'Writing Kode' is one such site that is an influence and inspiration for this one. Dirk uses C++ for his game, while my programming language of choice is Python, which I hope be a good choice. I expect my first tentative steps to emulate Dirk's, and then diverge from there.

As I am a hobbiest rather than a professional coder you shouldn't expect to see stellar examples of good Python coding. Rather I will be relating my trials and tribulations as they occur. I may also express my opinions on certain existing Roguelikes or ideas I would like to implement in my final game, however, I will try to keep that sort of thing to a minimum until I have some working code!

Coming soon: Creating a random dungeon